Everything devolves. Everything trends toward decay.
We are living in the petri dish of our own halfway point. The organizing, cleaning, exercise, and motivation has ceased. We wait to see what will happen. If anything will grow.
Ambition has ground to a halt. Projects have paused midstream. They often do. Everything is on hiatus. When left to its own devices, nature breaks things down – rot, weakness, crumbling, oblivion are inevitable.
Is there beauty in dystopia? We used to think so. We were children (”We are all just foolish children, searching desperately for ourselves, and in that struggle, we are lost.” – Me circa 1995/1996) and everything we thought or wept meant so much. It was never “Now what?” but always “What’s next?” The world was rife with beauty, sorrow, loneliness, and possibilities – even in the futile sameness I perceived was out there. My isolated, questioning tears seemed so significant.
We write things off as “the angst of youth.” For us, it was a time of self-centered importance, to be sure, but also of analysis, of well thought out arguments lasting into the early morning hours. Of ideas that created stories, self-published magazines, performances, and, yes, philosophical movements. It was a time of possibility and action. Not, as now, of taking things at face value. Accepting and not questioning. Taking what is offered without striving for personal goals and growth.
These are the thoughts preventing my sleep tonight, probably because I’ve got a meeting with a tech recruiter tomorrow which has made me introspective. In my dreams last night I was a super hero, graced with exceptional speed and the power to manipulate objects with my mind, but I was unable to achieve my desired transformation – to dissolve into a billion particles and disperse. To escape the evil pursuers attempting to capture me and obtain the information I was privy to. (I don’t recall what this was.) I wonder if we’ll ever understand the significance of dreams…
Is this odd, in-between place really where true change occurs? Is the past gone forever? Or, more importantly, are those people that we were gone forever?